Review

Eternal Enemies, poems by Adam Zagajewski (FSG): It sounds somewhat disingenuous now to call even a single poem beautiful, let alone an entire book, so it’s not without caution that I say Adam Zagajewski’s latest collection, Eternal Enemies, is exactly that: lovely, luminous, and wholly lacking the easy cynicism lesser poets might ascribe to such…

Home Remedies, stories by Angela Pneuman (Harcourt): In this dark and spirited debut collection, Pneuman mines the quirks of characters who hail from Kentucky to explore issues of religion, family, death, and sexual attraction. The eight fully realized stories featured here are sharp, well told, and—most important—fearless in their capacity to explore the contradictions both…

Epistles, poems by Mark Jarman, (Sarabande): Prized for his achievements in metrical verse and his deft deployment of English prosody, Mark Jarman turns, in Epistles, to the prose poem for this series of thirty dramatic monologues. Jarman’s explicit titular reference to the Apostolic letters of Paul lays the groundwork for an exhilarating experiment in this…

Every Past Thing, a novel by Pamela Thompson (Unbridled Books): I mean no slight to Pamela Thompson’s dazzling first novel, Every Past Thing, when I say that here is a book that can be judged by its cover: A reproduction of Edwin Romanzo Elmer’s exquisite "Mourning Picture." (The original hangs in the Smith College Museum…

Teeth, poems by Aracelis Girmay (Curbstone): The glorious and free-spirited poems of Girmay’s first collection move headlong beneath "bejackled" skies, spurred by passions so generous and unhindered as to recall Neruda’s magnanimous lyrics. With acrobatic ease, the poet swings from praise to lament, always returning to the heart’s motivating ardor for the larger world—its liars,…

The Pajamaist, poems by Mathew Zapruder (Copper Canyon): There is a famous story about John Lennon’s visit to a London art gallery in the sixties, in which the Beatle was faced with a precariously tall step ladder leading up to a dangling telescope. When he climbed to the top of the ladder and looked through…

The Monsters of Templeton, a novel by Lauren Groff (Voice): What’s fresh and fun about The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is how it doesn’t fit neatly into one contemporary genre. It’s literary, it’s historical, and it’s peppered with mysteries, ghosts, and "monsters." Even the packaging of the book is a delight—full of illustrations,…